America is the land of tips. If you eat at a restaurant, drink at a bar, take a cab, drop off your laundry or get a hair cut, you are expected to leave a hefty tip. The idea behind the tip in itself is quite a socially pleasing concept. According to Wikipedia: "A tip (also called a gratuity) is a voluntary extra payment made to certain service sector workers in addition to the advertised price of the transaction. Such payments and their size are a matter of social custom."The problem starts when business owners use this custom and exploit their employees by not paying them a proper salary for their hard work. Which brings me to the subject I wanted to talk about.

Recently, I keep stumbling upon a phenomena that seems to be spreading rapidly. Same as any employee who performs a task for an employer and expects to get paid afterwards, musicians do too. But, it seems that more and more places would rather not pay the musicians, and leave them in the mercy of the customers.

If you were a customer who just had a nice dinner or a few drinks, and paid a good amount of money (plus a tip to the waiter/bartender), would you be inclined to tip the band too? I'm sure there is no straight answer.

I first experienced this shortly after I moved to New York. I played the early set every week with a group of seven people at a club in Harlem. Not only did they not pay us, and we had to figure out how to divide $13 worth of tips between seven people, but the band that played after us did get paid. After that I came across many other venues that offered the same kind of terms. Some give you food, some give you one drink, some give you a percentage of the bar, and some don't give you nothing.

Along side this trend, there is an ever growing trend of playing in the park, again, for tips. When you play in the park you set your own time, you play what you want to play, no body complains about you being too loud, you see beautiful girls jogging, and most important you get paid better tips. So why would anyone want to play in a club?

On the other hand, with the small amount of venues that feature live jazz music, and the growing number of really good musicians, where would people share their music with an audience? Those venues, paying or not, are giving an artist the most important thing he can ask for - a stage to perform his art. Whether or not there is an audience to listen to it is a different question (worthy of a post of its own). After playing at one of these venues recently, a friend of mine rightly noted that it is a great opportunity to connect and acquire new fans. Unlike restaurant gigs, you can play whatever kind of music you want to, and you have more of the audience's attention.At the end of the day, we are all (I hope) just trying to create something that expresses us, and you can't put a price tag on that anyway.

It seems that as long as there is an endless supply of good (and starving) musicians, new venues that don't pay their bands will keep popping up. Whether it is a good or bad thing, I'll let you decide. I think what Ron Carter once said sums it up the best: musicians don't know how to say 'no'.

Thanks for reading,

Yaron.

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This blog started as a birthday resolution. I was never much aware of the whole blogging community out there, or why people wrote blogs. A friend of mine told me I should give it a try, and so I did.

I write about what comes most naturally for me - music. I am a saxophone player and composer from Israel, living in New York City since 2006. It's not easy for any artist to survive in NY, not to mention succeed. But, for some reason every day there are many people arriving to the city, unpacking their suitcases and calling it their new home.

There is not much interest for me to hype what I do here and make it sound like I am one of the few that are making it. In this blog I tell things as they are, or at least as I see them.